Songfacts®:

• The song title refers to Coney Island, a peninsula in Brooklyn, New York, which is home to a famous amusement park. Between the end of the 19th century and World War II, Coney Island's entertainment area was one of the United States' biggest tourist attractions, attracting several million visitors per year. Taylor Swift is using the peninsular neighborhood in this song to represent her regrets about a past relationship that went wrong.
  
  And I'm sitting on a bench in Coney Island
  Wondering where did my baby go?
  
  Swift explained to Apple Music she chose the titular tourist attraction to represent "a place where thrills were once sought, a place where once it was all electricity and magic and now the lights are out and you're looking at it thinking, 'What did I do?'"
• The National lead singer Matt Berninger joins Swift on the song to croon his view of the dissolution of the romance. He too expresses his remorse for messing up their relationship. During the back-and-forth conversational bridge, they both admit to neglecting the other. Swift explained that the lyrics she wrote for Berninger were coming from "a male perspective of regret or guilt after a lifetime of a pattern of behavior."
  
  Swift added that she'd touched on the same topic on another Evermore track, "Tolerate It," "where there's this person who's on one side of the relationship who's felt like their partner's been there, but they haven't been there. They've been there, but they're just sitting next to each other eating breakfast. They haven't been there."
• Swift released Evermore on December 11, 2020, two days before her 31st birthday on December 13. Thirteen is famously Swift's lucky number and she was especially excited about turning 31 because it's her lucky number backwards. Swift frequently sneaks in references to the number in her music, and here she had a second reason for the song's location: Coney Island is part of Brooklyn Community District 13.
• Swift also references her birthday, possibly drawing from a past bad experience when her then-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal missed her 21st birthday party.
  
  Did I leave you hanging every single day?
  Were you standing in the hallway
  With a big cake, happy birthday
  
  Swift said it was a treat for her getting Matt Berninger to sing that particular lyric: "I also really liked having him say 'Happy Birthday' in the song where he's standing in the hallway with a big cake, Happy Birthday, and I knew I was going to release it on my birthday week. I actually got my favorite lead singer of my favorite band to wish me Happy Birthday, so that's the real win."
• Swift's boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, helped write "Coney Island" under the pseudonym of "William Bowery." Alwyn is also credited as a songwriter on two other Evermore tracks: The title song and "Champagne Problems."
  
  Why William Bowery? "It was a combination of William... my great-grandfather – who I actually never met – who was a composer," Alwyn explained on The Kelly Clarkson Show. "He wrote a lot of classical music and he wrote a lot of film scores. And then Bowery is the area in New York that I spent a lot of time in when I first moved over there. So I stuck them together."
• After borrowing Multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner from The National for Folklore, Swift enlists almost the full band for "Coney Island." Dessner's twin brother, Bryce Dessner, plays drums; Scott Devendorf bass and a pocket piano; and Bryce Dessner also helped produce the track.
• Dessner explained to Rolling Stone that he had been writing some music with Bryce Dessner, some of which they were sending to Swift. At first this song wasn't earmarked for anyone specifically, but then Swift and William Bowery wrote the lyrics for it and they recorded it with just her vocals.
  
  "Listening to the words, we all collectively realized that this does feel like the most related to the National," Aaron Dessner said. "It almost feels like a story Matt [Berninger] might tell, or I could hear Bryan [Devendorf] playing the drum part."
• Taylor Swift paid tribute to The National by debuting "Coney Island" live on the April 28, 2023, Atlanta, Georgia, stop of her Eras tour. She performed the song for the first time on the same day the band released their First Two Pages Of Frankenstein album.
  
  Before playing the song, Swift shouted out The National. "This band has influenced me beyond my ability to verbalize how much they've influenced me - just lyrically, their ability to set a scene, their ability to tell a story," she said. "And obviously, Aaron Dessner is in the National and he has completely changed my life."